Healing Hand
by Kalira of the flames
Summary: Set between 5.03 and 5.04. Dean wakes from a nightmare and someone is there to lay his arms down. Dean/Castiel Pre-slash. Rating for a scene from Hell.


**Healing Hand**

Dean dreamed of Hell.

There was blood. There was rotting flesh. There was shrieking so loud it made your head pound in agony. You wanted to bash your own skull in just to make the noise stop.

Today was a cutting day. Every bit of his skin was cut without a single piece being peeled off. It was almost like art the way demons could handle a blade. They had a lot of time to practice.

They had done a particularly good job on his eyelids. He could see through them when he closed his eyes.

His eyes were the only part of him left whole.

…He really wished he couldn't see.

He was facing another rack.

And there was a child.

A little boy with floppy hair and wide, sad brown eyes. Those were about the only things left on the child intact.

His left arm was hanging off of his body, his legs mangled. They had done something to his midsection. Sliced it open and filled it hot rocks probably. That was a popular choice these days…

Oh god, his _face_...

Dean wondered how the boy could continue to make noise out of that ruin of a face. Part of him, the part that still could, prayed that this wasn't real. There was no way a child could be sent to hell. It had to be an illusion sent just for Dean. They had done it before. Kid's eyes reminded him so much of little Sammy...

"Don't worry, kid. I'll get you out of here…" Dean's ruined form leaned closer to the boy whose eyes went impossibly wider and he writhed on the hooks that held him as if to get away.

Dean studied the rusted blade in his shredded fingers and promptly decided the eyes were the next thing to go. No child should have to _see _the horrors of hell.

Dean smiled and laughed as the boy whimpered and screamed…

--

Dean woke up laughing at the child with no eyes.

He was laughing and then choking and then sobbing. Tears streaming down his face as his body spasmed and his hand clenched in the cheap sheets on his bed, unconsciously trying to wipe off the gore.

It hadn't really been a child.

Children didn't go to hell that he knew of, but human souls could be made to look however the demon in charge wanted…

Dean's breath hitched and he tightened his grip, as though that would solidify his hold on the earth. As if that would take away the thirty years of pain (agonyanguishcrucifixionexcruciatingimpalementfuckingmartyrdom…the rack…)

and the ten years after…

He couldn't be sure if the dream was a memory or something his mind had been creative about. There were so many others… So many people crying and screaming… So many pleading eyes… He had loved cutting out their eyes.

His grief and anger and helplessness warred within him until he thought the pounding in his head was going to rupture a blood vessel.

Dean scanned the room, the sheets clinging to his bare chest from cold sweat. 3:00 AM and all's well.

Just him and the double bed since Sam had split again almost two weeks ago. Sometimes he splurged and got a kitchenette since he didn't have the cost of two beds anymore, but most of the time he didn't give a shit. He was only staying in New Jersey for two days so he had grabbed a room at the first crappy hotel he saw.

Dean realized his hands were still curled like claws in the bedclothes and grimaced. This shit should have been over with by now. Waking up at the buttcrack of dawn with these nightmares, shaking and sweating so bad he couldn't move...

He was pretty sure he never screamed, audibly at least, while he was sleeping. But he must have done something because Sam looked at him sometimes like he _knew… _

But he could never _know. _Not really.

Never know how close his brother had come to becoming a demon in the 'short' time he was in Hell, how he sporadically saw black eyes in the mirror, how sometimes the sight of blood and gore got his heart pumping in a way that wasn't very PC.

Those times he could feel that _potential _crawling under his skin like a sentient being. Something he could never wash clean because it was part of him. It was _inside. Waiting. _

Why he could _never_ understand Sam's choices last year, to add more of that poison into his system. To want to even be close to the kind of thing that would flay skin and crack bones and delight in every kind of destruction.

…Let out a deep breath.

Calm down…

_Get your ass up because the Apocolypse isn't going to wait for you to get over your issues__._

Dean started to pull himself out of the bed, looking at a glass of water, then going out for something stronger, when he felt a curious sensation like a vacuum in the room was being filled. There was no sound or indication, but he knew he was no longer alone.

The hunter sighed and slumped back into the covers wearily. He called out without looking up. "Cas, what the hell are you doing here?"

Apparently the angel had bamfed in across the room because Dean heard a few footfalls before Castiel came to where Dean lay. He groped blindly for the light on the bedside table for a few seconds, trying not to think about how weird it was that he could register Castiel on instinct almost as well as he could hone in on Sam.

"Dean, we need to talk."

_Oh, that old line. _"Dude, it's the middle of the night. Don't you sleep?"

Well, come to think of it he probably didn't. Since Cas had defected from Heaven where _did_ he go when he wasn't calling Dean's cell phone to check where he was, or popping up randomly to give him a sunshiny reminder of the eminent doom of the human race, or asking him how buy prepaid minutes on his cell phone at an ungodly hour of the morning?

The angel slowly shook his head, expression flat but pensive. "You weren't sleeping either."

"It was a work in progress." Dean sighed and sat up, wondering why he kept telling his angel stalker where he was if he didn't want these kinds of late night interruptions. And, if he were fully honest with himself, he appreciated the company. But he wasn't being honest with himself, so he settled on being surly.

Castiel's eyes narrowed slightly, eyebrows settling that way they did when the angel was trying to figure out a strange human custom, or doing that 'awkward staring' thing at Dean. Apparently he saw something he didn't like because he crossed the rest of the way to Dean's bedside and moved in closer.

Personal space was really nonexistent with this guy. Dean leaned back against the headboard. "What?"

"You have not been restful." Castiel tilted his head a little, which was not as funny when he was so close. "What have you been dreaming about?"

Dean blinked, he hadn't really counted on Cas using his angel mojo to see into his mind.

Of course all his musing went to an abrupt halt when the angel suddenly laid a warm hand on his heart. Which, he wasn't wearing a shirt, so that was a little bizarre and _weird_. "I don't really swing that way. You mind?"

"You should have told me your nightmares had returned." Castiel was right in his face, his eyes brooding but concerned… and right. The fuck. There.

Dean couldn't stand it. "Look Cas, I know we've been kind of buddy-buddy lately but you can't just—"

His voice broke off when Cas leaned over him to fit his hand into the bare skin of the mark on his shoulder.

His breath caught and everything stilled.

He could feel his heart beating in his chest suddenly. It hadn't sped up, but it was beating hard. All he could see was the blue of his eyes as warmth from Castiel's palm pulsed through him.

Dean made a strangled noise and slumped further down the headboard against the bed. Almost every muscle in his body systematically relaxed and his brain became useless mush between his ears. "C-Cas…"

Castiel sat next to him as that warmth continued to pour into Dean from the brand. He had some thoughts on this strangely intimate moment, but they flitted through his mind so fast he couldn't seem to make them go to his mouth. Instead the only sounds in the room were uneven pants and long ragged breaths.

The feeling spread through him like an infection.

Euphoria.

Ecstacy.

_Peace._

Finally, Castiel's human voice was reduced to a comfortable rumble in the background of the serenity that he couldn't resist. He wasn't sure if he liked it.

He called again, but it came out a helpless moan. "Cas…"

"Rest now."

His eyes were like a patch of sky on the first real day of spring, first day you can take off your jacket and lay in the sun.

Dean's eyes closed.

"You will be fine, Dean."

His voice was amplified. It became every sound that had ever been a comfort. A guitar solo, breeze through the trees on an open road, the purr of the Impala…

"Know that you were chosen by God…"

He smelled like Indian summers, fresh pie, and a newly mowed lawn in Kansas…

"For something greater than being a vessel to an archangel…"

He didn't register the words but it soothed something inside of him, calmed the last of his struggle.

"Dean…"

Just before the last of his awareness dissipated into dreamless rest, he heard his angel whisper.

"I have faith in you."


End file.
